Some people are baffled by the concept that there really are people who actually like children but don’t want any of their own. “Childfree” doesn’t automatically mean someone who simply hates children. The thing is, I do like kids, and I will absolutely not compromise on my stance that each and every child deserves to grow up in a safe, stable and supportive environment. I also know that I get aggressive if I’m constantly sleep-deprived or overstimulated. People generally don’t regard me as someone capable of violence, but if I can’t get 15 minutes of silence each day and at least 5 hours of sleep every night, I will start throwing things. And I know kids won’t let you have that. Ever.
Kids deserve to grow up feeling safe and cherished, unafraid to express themselves and without worry that they’re unwelcome or unwanted. And that’s why they should be doing that somewhere else than in my fucking house.
I this is because many do not understand theres levels between “want children” and “can never be near them lest you splat them into a wall”
I have a nice little scale i call the Teacher/Parent/Uncle/Friend/Never scale
Teacher- You can be around children in fact you can be around alot of children and can sort of parent/ deal with children other then your own. for at least 8 hours daily
Parent- You are around them near 24/7 you know their specific needs. might not fare well with other peoples children but you know your own children
uncle- you could not take care of kids 24/7 but you can maybe take care of one of a various age group if you needed too without much trouble for maybe a week or maybe babysittings on the table too
Friend-Babysittings possible but not for long /multiple days. you could not raise children and you can keep them entertained if your with them for a couple hours but your childcare skills dont go beyond that and your fine with that
never- you cannot handle kids in any capacity. just pretty much when you need to in public spaces and thats it
Replacing physical buttons and controls with touchscreens also means removing accessibility features. Physical buttons can be textured or have Braille and can be located by touch and don’t need to be pressed with a bare finger. Touchscreens usually require precise taps and hand-eye coordination for the same task.
Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment’s notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.
Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a “locate then press” style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.
When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?
Who is allowed to control the physical world, and who is making that decision?
Thinking today about how as someone with major texture issues around most fruits and vegetables, it would have helped so much if someone had come to me years ago and said
Hey:
Make it tiny
Mix it with something Good Texture that you like
“Eat healthy!” they say, and then they show you pictures of a smiling woman digging a fork into half a butternut squash or eyeing a bowl of whole blueberries like a ravening wolf and your spine wants to crawl out through your skull at the thought of that Texture in your mouth.
But you know what I can do? Cut zucchini into paper-thin slices and cook it with noodles and marinara. Chop that spinach fine and scramble it with eggs and cheese. If I’m having a day where the thought of a grape popping in my mouth makes me nauseous, I can cut it in half. My chinese takeout gets diced into tiny pieces and mixed into the rice. It doesn’t work with everything - seeds are still a Major Problem - but the number of fruits and veg and even world cuisines that I can eat has expanded SO MUCH since I discovered this. YMMV, but it’s such a stupidly simple thing to do, and nobody ever told me.
PREACH!!!!
I can eat onions and tomatoes and asaparugus and even lettuce sometimes now bc I started with small diced bits in other food and slowly became accustomed to the texture
KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users’ Mental Health Crises for “Content”
I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.
Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)
But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.
I couldn’t even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I’m glad I stopped to read, because:
What you say on there won’t be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn’t even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)
Also, what you say on there? Is now…
Koko’s intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
Publicly performing or displaying your “content” (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
Sell / share this “content” with other businesses
Any harm you come to using Koko? That’s on you.
And Koko won’t take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)
They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn’t find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of “People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find”. Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.
So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.
(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don’t read if you’re not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)
There are young people on tumblr that actively seek support from KokoBot right now, if you check the tag for recent posts. Those people did not get paid to promote it, so do not harrass them. If you can, direct them towards resources about Kokobot (like this post) that are more transparent about what this company is up to.
time travel fics where it’s Luke and/or Leia who goes back to the prequels as opposed to prequels characters going back to the prequels are incredibly funny because instead of emotional tension you could cut with a knife and horrible grief overlaying every action it’s just one (or two) ridiculously powerful people running around with absolutely no idea what’s going besides (a) that the chancellor everybody loves is pure evil and plotting the downfall of the republic and (b) that their dad (with whom they have a VERY complex relationship) is, at best, old enough to be barely out of space college. who needs complex and carefully rendered plans based on a million different remembered factors when you can have one of the space twins seeing Palpatine and trying to kill him with their illegal laser sword on sight
Leia: That’s a Sith Lord.
Mace: That’s the Chancellor.
Leia: He’s a Sith. He’s ready to blow up entirely planets for the fun of it as soon as he’s got the weapon built. I can prove it.
Obi-Wan: And how do you plan on doing that?
Leia: Hm…
[five minutes later, when nobody’s close enough to tackle her]
Leia, her laser sword in one hand and a blaster in the other: HEY SIDIOUS
Yoda: Taken our eyes off her, we should not have.
Leia, cocking her gunsaber: Diplomacy is for people who didn’t blow up my planet
the order of the red and blue implies that leia kills him after she loses the gun. this has me thinking of the prequel cast having some epic quest to stop her from killing palpatine and when they finally get the gun she just strangles him
Since the discussion of commenting on ao3 (or really any creative work) is going around, just a reminder that your comments don’t have to be this pristine pinnacle of human joy. You can just say “i want to eat this art” “i want this carved into my ribcage” etc etc. The intense and strange genuineness carries through - we understand that it moved you so deeply that you are experiencing a visceral love for it
And you don’t even have to say that!! You can literally just be like “<3” “i love this” “beautiful” etc etc. The fact you took a brief moment out of your day to comment at all means so much more than you can imagine
So yeah comment on shit that makes you happy or moves you in some way
Someone once sent me three rows of the heart emoji in everycoloroftherainbow as a comment on one of my fanfics, and I spent almost the entire day grinning like a fool because it felt like they just reached through the screen of my phone and gave me a hug.
Write that comment. It can be a single word, a scream of text, or even a row of emojis. I guarantee you that we love
It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black night. This dude swam towards a lure, slapped at it with his glove, and when it got caught; he let himself float and tugged on the line so the fisherman thought he had hooked a 100+ pound salmon. Once he was finally up to the shore, he turned a flashlight on in the guy’s face and walked out of the water, saying “good morning, gentlemen. State fish and game warden, you’re under arrest.“
At this point, the guy who had reeled him in had literally fallen over in shock, and the other people with him were scared shitless. The warden whipped some citations out of a plastic bag in his wetsuit, made the trespassers sign them, asked if they had any questions, and then gathered all of their fishing gear. And he just. Walked back into the river. And quietly swam away, without another word.
This man is a legend.
warden coming out of his river to shame fishermankind
The proof-of-concept device was created by researchers from the McKelvey School of Engineering and the School of Medicine at Washington University…
The results are contained in a July 10 publication in Nature Communications that provides details about how the technology works.
The device holds promise as a breakthrough that - when commercially available - could be used in hospitals and health care facilities, schools, congregate living quarters, and other public places to help detect not only the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but other respiratory virus aerosol such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) as well.
“There is nothing at the moment that tells us how safe a room is,” Cirrito said, in the university’s news release. “If you are in a room with 100 people, you don’t want to find out five days later whether you could be sick or not. The idea with this device is that you can know essentially in real time, or every 5 minutes, if there is a live virus in the air.”
How It Works
The team combined expertise in biosensing with knowhow in designing instruments that measure the toxicity of air. The resulting device is an air sampler that operates based on what’s called “wet cyclone technology.” Air is sucked into the sampler at very high speeds and is then mixed centrifugally with a fluid containing a nanobody that recognizes the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That fluid, which lines the walls of the sampler, creates a surface vortex that traps the virus aerosols. The wet cyclone sampler has a pump that collects the fluid and sends it to the biosensor for detection of the virus using electrochemistry.
The success of the instrument is linked to the extremely high velocity it generates - the monitor has a flow rate of about 1,000 liters per minute - allowing it to sample a much larger volume of air over a 5-minute collection period than what is possible with currently available commercial samplers. It’s also compact - about one foot wide and 10 inches tall - and lights up when a virus is detected, alerting users to increase airflow or circulation in the room.
Testing the Monitor
To test the monitor, the team placed it in the apartments of two Covid-positive patients. The real-time air samples from the bedrooms were then compared with air samples collected from a virus-free control room. The device detected the RNA of the virus in the air samples from the bedrooms but did not detect any in the control air samples.
In laboratory experiments that aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 into a room-sized chamber, the wet cyclone and biosensor were able to detect varying levels of airborne virus concentrations after only a few minutes of sampling, according to the study.
“We are starting with SARS-CoV-2, but there are plans to also measure influenza, RSV, rhinovirus and other top pathogens that routinely infect people,” Cirrito said. “In a hospital setting, the monitor could be used to measure for staph or strep, which cause all kinds of complications for patients. This could really have a major impact on people’s health.”
The Washington University team is now working to commercialize the air quality monitor.”
-via Forbes, July 11, 2023
-
Holy shit. I know it’s still early in the technology and more testing will inevitably be needed but holy shit.
Literally, if it bears out, this could revolutionize medicine. And maybe let immunocompromised people fucking go places again
Also, for those who don’t know, Nature Communications is a very prestigious scientific journal that focuses on Pretty Big Deal research. Their review process is incredibly rigorous. This is an absolutely HUGE credibility boost to this research and prototyp
So I got this super cute dress for the bridal shower right, well I got my period yesterday morning and I immediately went uhhh to wearing a dress on Sunday but I ordered these tiny booty shorts that are like bike short-tight so I can wear them under my dress to be more comfortable but now I’m not sure whether the shorts are visible or not like the dress is white with blue patterns and the shorts are like sky blue idk ugh
The end! Fifty? Who knew. Thank you all for reading, and thank you to everyone who wrote to tell me they got something out of them. Keep going. Make things and help others who try – you know how miserable their day probably is.
-your friend the author (who also would not trade the misery for anything else, really)
The point shouldn’t be to identify for sure 100% what is ai art and what isn’t. I keep seeing posts advising one to look out for wonky perspective (as if perspective doesn’t routinely trip up even the most experienced artists) or to pay attention to fudged detailing (as if impressionism wasn’t one of the most influential artistic movements in history), and I think that’s coming from a good place but frankly it’s a losing battle. Remember when everyone was on about counting the fingers or counting the teeth, and a week later they had that shit ironed out completely? All you’re really doing is giving these people more data points to work with to refine their algorithm. It’s just going to be constantly shifting goalposts, and at a certain point real artists are going to get exhausted trying to make their art look as not algorithmically generated as possible. It’ll be impossible to keep up.
So what should we do? Honestly, I think old practices are still best practices. Find real artists and follow them. Don’t repost art, and dont spread reposted art. If something doesn’t have a source, skip it. Support artists you like, either by sharing their work directly or donating. And if someone’s work looks suspicious? Maybe give them a second look. See some of their other art before jumping to conclusions.
And yes, that means sometimes, you’re gonna be tricked. Some people are going to fly under the radar and pass off ai art as their own. And that sucks, and they’re liars, but you can’t let the obsession with bad actors police real artists out of their communities, or discourage new artists from entering the scene.
![do-you-have-a-flag:
“ hoseph-christiansen:
“ theawesomeadventurer:
“ ultrafacts:
“ Source: [x]
Follow Ultrafacts for more facts! ”
okay but this is a power move above any other
”
It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1fd447caa3b037691cd21fe9101a7388/tumblr_oyqfosuqIB1rhavdko1_500.png)
